Understanding the conservative mind, without brain scans

by Massimo Pigliucci

Is Nietzsche to be found somewhere between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia? This is just one of a series of intriguing claims I am encountering while reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, by my CUNY colleague Corey Robin, a political theorist, journalist and associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center.

The context of that specific statement is Robin’s contention that there is a level of coherence among reactionaries across times and places, so that it is possible to draw parallels between the thoughts of people so apparently different from each other as the three mentioned above. But my goal here is not primarily to discuss the details of the book (which I’m still reading, and to which I will likely come back), but rather to use it as a vehicle for a broader discussion of what in philosophy are referred to as levels of analysis.

Let’s begin with something very different from the topic of how conservative minds work. Say that you are interested in the workings of a particular ecosystem, like the Arctic tundra. Pertinent topics of study will include the composition, distribution and abundance of the fauna and flora of the tundra, as well as of the nature of the various species-species interactions, i.e., you’ll be doing population biology and biogeography. It will also be relevant to know things about the local climate, its short term variability, and its long term changes (both past and future). So you’ll engage in a bit of climate science and paleoclimatology. Moreover, you’ll need to develop an understanding of nutrient cycling within the ecosystem, thereby bringing geology and geochemistry into the mix.

There are also a number of scientific disciplines that will likely not cross your mind to engage during your study of the Arctic tundra: quantum mechanics and cosmology, for instance. Why not? Isn’t the tundra a particular type of bio-physical system on a particular planet in a particular solar system in a particular galaxy? Shouldn’t cosmology, therefore, be relevant? And isn’t everything that makes up said ecosystem made of quarks and other subatomic entities, the understanding of which is obviously the province of fundamental physics?

The answer to the latter questions is that while yes, the tundra and everything in it is both made of particles and located in a certain corner of the cosmos, neither level of analysis is informative to the problem at hand, namely the description and understanding of the bio-dynamics characteristic of the Arctic tundra.

This, mind you, isn’t an argument against ontological reductionism (the claim that everything is made of the basic stuff identified by fundamental physics), nor is it a panegyric on behalf of emergent properties. Ontological reductionism may or may not be true, and conversely strong emergentism may not or may hold, and you’d still have no use for quantum mechanics and cosmology when it comes to ecosystem studies. The issue is epistemic, not ontological.

If the case I have just made for the tundra is relatively uncontroversial (as I certainly hope it is!), then we are ready to move to another one that is a bit more complicated and certainly more controversial: the issue of “the conservative mind” with which we began.

Let’s start easy: we can surely agree that conservatives (meaning human beings who expound one version or another of a range of political positions collectively referred to by political scientists and philosophers as conservative, as opposed to progressive) are also made of quarks and located in a particular corner of the Milky Way. And yet, just like in the case of the Arctic tundra, neither quantum mechanics nor cosmology will tell us anything relevant about the conservative mind, yes?

Now let’s zoom in a little. Coming from “above,” so to speak (i.e., zooming onto our problem while descending from a cosmic perspective), we may want to embark on a philosophical analysis of the ideas proposed by conservatives; or (not exclusive) we may be interested in the history and sociology of the conservative movement.

Coming in from “below” (i.e., adjusting our epistemic zoom while ascending from the quantum mechanical level), we could consider the psychology of the conservative mind, or its brain anatomy and physiology, or even inquire as to whether there are “conservative genes” that may help us explain, say, the Red/Blue state divide in the United States of America. Which, naturally, would then lead us to ask how and why such genes evolved in the first place.

I think all these perspectives (i.e., from philosophy, sociology, psychology, neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology) are pertinent, but some much more than others. That is, I argue that some of these approaches will be epistemically significantly more informative than others in terms of the task at hand, to wit, understanding the conservative mind (hint: notice that I am using the term mind here, not brain).

At this point you may want to pause before reading any further, and perhaps place online bets with other Rationally Speaking readers as to which of the above fields I am going to up-play or down-play in what follows...

As you must have realized, we live in a brave new era of brain scans and genomics, so that every claim that comes with an fMRI attached to it (or, less sexy, a high throughput DNA scan), is ipso facto cool and scientifically interesting. [No, I’m not implying that neurobiology and genomics are not actually interesting. Then again, quantum mechanics and cosmology are also interesting, and yet irrelevant to understanding tundras...]

The problem, of course, is in assessing the usefulness of claims made on the basis of these new technologies. For instance, it may be interesting to see which areas of the brain are primarily involved in, say, reading as opposed to talking. But that some areas of the brain underly both activities is a truism: how else did you think you were capable of reading and talking?

Take, for instance, several recent studies showing particular patterns of brain activity during meditation or deep prayer. Skeptics of the more mystical claims made by practitioners of these techniques triumphantly say: “Ah! See? There is nothing transcendental about this stuff, it’s just your brain doing weird things.” True believers retort along the lines of: “I told you so! There really is a transcendental realm that the human brain is uniquely equipped to access!” In reality, of course, the fact that our brains behave in a particular manner when we engage in meditation or prayer says absolutely nothing about the reality, or lack thereof, of any supra-physical realm. That is because we expect to see those very patterns under either scenario, so that the high-tech demonstration of “your brain on prayer” tells us what we already knew: whatever behavior a human being engages in, it’s got to have something to do with his brain.

Back to conservatism. A few months ago, Julia Galef and I had a nice conversation with Chris Mooney during a Rationally Speaking podcast, focusing on his latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality.  The first quibble I have with Chris’s book is the title [1]. While his previous volume, The Republican War on Science, was aptly titled (it was, after all, about the anti-science attitude of the G.W. Bush administration), this one is, I think, unnecessarily contentious: it’s not Republican brains in particular that are of interest, since Republicanism is a specific product of a given time and culture (indeed, modern day Republicans have very little to do with, say, Lincoln-type Republicans), but rather the conservative attitude of which contemporary Republicanism in the United States happens to be a particular instantiation.

Be that as it may, Chris’s book has received much attention because it promises to provide a scientific (as in natural science, particularly neurobiology and genetics) understanding of the problem at hand, rather than a “merely” philosophical, historical, sociological or psychological one. [Of course, if you happen to be a conservative, and in particular a Republican, you will not see what “the problem” is in the first place.]

While Chris is careful to dispel easy accusations of biological reductionism and determinism, he does paint a picture whereby the brain (not, more expansively, the mind) is the main locus of the conservative attitude, and where there is evidence of a genetic basis for conservatism, with a hint of (just-so) scenarios concerning how such attitude may have been engrained in some of us by natural selection in the distant past (say, the Pleistocene, far earlier than the onset of the Grand Old Party).

I do not wish to engage in a detailed critique of specific claims made in the studies that Chris used as the basis of his book. Some of that criticism has been done in thoughtful reviews of the volume (there were also a number of decidedly not thoughtful ones), and at any rate several of those studies are sound, as far as they go. The question I wish to raise is just how far do they, in fact, go in providing us with an understanding of the conservative mind.

Not much, and far less, I think, than the combination of psychological, sociological, historical and philosophical approaches do.

Let’s start with the evolutionary biology. Broadly speaking, there is little doubt that the repertoire of human behavior evolved over a long period of time, and that some of that evolution was adaptive in nature (i.e., the result of a process of natural selection). But readers of this blog should know that I put little stock into many specific evolutionary psychological explanations, for a variety of methodological problems that I do not need to repeat here.

As for the genetics, again, it should certainly be uncontroversial (pace some extreme postmodernists) to claim that genes affect human behavior, but even Chris points out that the amount of variation in the population explained by candidate genes for complex human behaviors (such as homosexuality, and probably even more so the somewhat fuzzy concept of conservatism) is a small fraction of the total. Significantly less appreciated is the point that if genes account for a small percentage of the variation in a given human behavior, then it must be that a large fraction of that variation is due either to the environment or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., to gene-environment interactions). Which in turn means that evolutionary explanations become marginal at best.

It also means that much of the explanatory power to be found in brain activity is actually dependent on the environment and/or on its interactions with the basic structure of the brain itself. [And a further complication is that brains develop through time and maintain a degree of plasticity throughout one’s life. Yet, for obvious logistical reasons, we don’t have as yet any study using fMRI to track changes in brain activity in response to the bewildering variety of environmental stimuli we all experience from the pre-natal period until we die.]

Which is why the most informative loci of analysis to understand conservatism are the historical-sociological (the broader environment), the philosophical (the conceptual stuff of which conservative ideas are made of), and the psychological. This last one is, of course, connected to the lower level that is the target of neurobiology, but contra what appears to be an increasingly common misconception, psychology doesn’t reduce to neurobiology. Or, to put it another way, neurobiology isn’t psychology done with fMRI, and therefore more “scientific.” That’s because psychology deals with the mind, not just the brain. The mind (I actually prefer to use a verb, minding, because we are not talking about an object) is what the brain does when it interacts with the various layers of the external environment. And these layers are shaped by the history, sociology and philosophy of ideas.

That is why, for instance, it only took me a few pages to find the first interesting statement in Robin’s book: “conservatism is ... the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” One may agree or not with this way of conceptualizing conservatism (i.e., in terms of power struggles), but Robin proceeds to give a detailed political-sociological-historical-philosophical analysis to back it up, and one cannot reject his take on it without engaging in some detail with his analysis.

Along similar lines, Robin writes: “Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality and the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality ... is not the threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... If women and workers are provided with the economic resources to make independent choices, they will be free not to obey their husbands and employers.”

Proceeding from this way of framing the issue, Robin immediately arrives at an interesting analysis of the otherwise highly puzzling fact that libertarians tend to be associated with conservatives, rather than with progressives (or rather than distancing themselves from both): “When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. ... This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth.”

I am not suggesting that Robin’s analysis is necessarily correct. I am still near the beginning of the book, and I will need time to process his framework and the historical and sociological evidence he brings to the book. But my brain (!) sure started working at a much higher rate than usual even while reading the introduction to The Reactionary Mind, while the same brain seems to have by now developed a dulled response to yet another fMRI scan or just-so story about the very distant evolutionary past of Homo sapiens. And that’s because I think evolution, genetics, and neurobiology are far less explanatory of the conservative (or, for that matter, the progressive) mind than the disciplines that Robin’s book calls upon as resources. This is no slight to the natural sciences in question, no more than the one delivered by the ecosystem ecologist who wisely ignores cosmology and quantum mechanics.

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[1] Unless he objected to it and the publisher overruled him, which happened to me with Answers for Aristotle...